This chapter focuses on the figure of the Cyclops and the use of ‘the animal’ in thinking human difference. It presents the animalizing of certain humans (the attribution of animal features to them) as a potent strategy to dehumanize and thus marginalize certain ways of being human. In the ethnographic imagination of Homer’s Odyssey, the margins of the known world are shown to coincide with the margins of the human. The chapter further illustrates that this spatial concept of the human did not remain restricted to the ancient world but carries on into the modern: The figure of the Cyclops, whose problematic humanity is in sharp contrast to the enlightened, educated, and cunning Odysseus, in many ways anticipates that of ‘the savage’ as the quintessential ‘other’ in the modern Western ethnographic literature. And yet the question arises as to whether the ancient story does not already expose the kind of hubris at play when we normalize certain ways of being human while dismissing others.

The second chapter touches more firmly on the philosophical debate and the arguments for human exceptionalism put forward over its course. The chapter puts Xanthus (the prophetic horse from Homer’s Iliad) as the first and prototypical speaking animal in the Western tradition in conversation with other famous speaking animals, including Plutarch’s speaking pig Grunter (Gryllus), a speaking rooster who claims to be a re-incarnation of the philosopher Pythagoras, and Kafka’s Red Peter. The chapter shows that the figure of the speaking animal is central to Western conceptions of the human. In classical antiquity, it features in stories that confirm the vertical relationship between humans (at the top) and animals (below). And yet, at the same time, right from the start of the conversation in the ancient world, the apparent anthropomorphism of the speaking animal was also used to critique the very idea of human exceptionalism. There is a direct line between how some modern animal fables point to man’s animal nature and the concept of the human explored in parts of the ancient evidence.

This chapter discusses Hadrian’s taste in poetry (a preference for Ennius over Vergil; Antimachus over Homer); his own surviving poems, with discussion of some dedicatory and sepulchral epigrams, and with a proposal about the nature of the possibly polymetric Catachannae mentioned by the Augustan History; and poetry composed with an eye to his approval, like the Altar of the high equestrian official L. Iulius Vestinus (perhaps dateable precisely to 24 January AD 132) and the mysterious inscribed elegiacs from Baetica, signed by ‘Arrian the proconsul’, on a hunter’s proper offerings to Artemis.

After defining ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ in relation to character or behaviour and to setting, this chapter notes that, whereas the other four Greek ‘ideal’ novelists create a realistic background, whether using personal observation or historiography, Longus draws chiefly on literary texts that themselves present a fictional world (Homer and Theocritus) or one that is semi-fictional (archaic melic poetry). ‘The Country’ explores Longus’ debt to Theocritus’ landscape, especially that of Idyll 1, advertised by his preface as several steps removed from the real world. The chapter then discusses the relation of 2.32 to Theocritus 1; of 1.17.3 to Sappho and Anacreon via Theocritus 11, complicated by the term ἀληθῶς, ‘really’; and of the apple at 3.33.4 to Sappho’s epithalamia, Ibycus, and Theocritus 28. ‘The city’ explores the literary forebears of Longus’ Megacles; ‘The sea’ looks at his ‘Tyrian’ pirates’ origins in earlier novels, especially Chariton’s; and ‘Reality’ considers how his use of Thucydides underlines his own fictionality. Overall it is the chapter’s stress on the fictionality, rather than on the poetic status, of most of Longus’ intertexts that differentiates its writer’s position from those of Richard Hunter and Maria Pia Pattoni.

This chapter traces the use of the sublime in ancient Greek and Latin literature from Homer through Augustine. Starting from the basic premise that the study of the classical sublime cannot be restricted to a reading of Longinus, it demonstrates that the sublime was a recognizable phenomenon, an ethical stance, a marker of ideology and value, and a topic of debate from at least the fifth century BCE. Ancient writers make sublime spectacles out of practically anything, from the starry sky to the gemstone, from monumental architecture to architectural ruins. Numerous texts imbue human subjects, such as mythological figures and natural philosophers, with a greatness of soul that electrifies readers with the thrill of the sublime, and when such figures falter or collapse, their fall from greatness is equally spectacular. The chapter concludes with a sample of texts that reject or problematize the value of the sublime or that police its use.

Chapter 5 touches on some of the points brought up in Chapter 3, notably ancient views of character, but has a different focus – narrative motivation, a category prominent particularly in story-oriented narratology. The Odyssey is the origin of the classical Western plot, and yet the motivation of the Penelope scenes in books 18 and 19 does not follow the logic which modern realist novels have made our default model. Instead, I suggest, Odyssey 18 and 19 have a design premised on features that we encounter in medieval narratives, notably retroactive motivation, thematic isolation and suspense about how. The reason why Penelope has provoked innumerous psychologizing interpretations in modern scholarship is that her comportment is not psychologically motivated by Homer. Similar cases of motivation that are bound to strike the reader of modern novels as peculiar can be found in Homer and also later literature. At first sight, these cases may seem to conflict with the emphasis on motivation in Aristotle and the scholia, but in viewing motivation in terms of plot rather than psychology, the critics share common ground with the texts discussed.

The second chapter explores the music behind the poetry of Homer, looking at the melodic part of poetry – that is, the part that makes poetry song – in the Iliad, Odyssey, and two Homeric Hymns. It suggests that the early conceptualization of music borrows from the fields of artisanal objects and animal sounds, using these two different kinds of materiality to enact the presence of melody avant la lettre. These modes of conceptualization both place song within the material world, suggesting a presence that can shift and change, but that it will persist by way of such change.

The third chapter turns to the body in erotic poetry. Here the temporal frame widens to embrace the experience of the present within longer human spans, a rhythm over lifetimes garnered through instances of erotic embodiment. Poetry can bind the inexplicable presence of touch to time, and can also summon the past as presence through the reenactment of the poem itself in performance, a dynamic we see at work in Sappho and then again in the modern erotic poetry of Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds – begging the question of why certain poetics recur across time. This is poetry that challenges the ephemerality of embodied experience by showing its power to reenact the force of touch.

The epilogue charts a return to the earliest Greek poets on record, Homer and Hesiod, and a discussion of how these poets used monumentality to depict matter shaping time.

The introduction argues that ancient Greek poetry exhibits a particularly acute awareness of change, decay, and ephemerality inherent in mortality. It stresses the fact that these poems have assumed at least two forms of materiality: one in relation to performing bodies and another as inscribed texts. After reviewing prior scholarship in these areas, it looks at definitions of the body and the word ephêmeros in Greek poetry, including Homer, Pindar, and other lyric poets, and in Ps.-Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, before offering summaries of the chapters of the book.

The first chapter looks at one half of song, namely rhythm. It seeks to understand how the idea of rhythm relates to the movements of the body, and particularly the heartbeat, starting with the earliest uses of the word rhythmos in poems of Archilochus of Theognis, moving back again to Homer and then forward to Aristophanes and Plato to understand the shifting ways that rhythm was understood to connect poems and bodies.

The sanctuary of Artemis on the island of Korkyra, modern Corfu, is presented as a case study of the relationship between the changing environment and the monumentalization of Greek sanctuaries through Doric stone architecture. Although the sculptural decoration of the Artemis temple, which is one of the earliest Doric temples known so far, is relatively well preserved, modern scholars disagree on the interpretation of the sculptures. The question of how the representations of Medusa and other mythological figures on the pediments and metopes related to the divinity worshipped in the sanctuary and to the local context are particularly controversial. However, as the chapter argues, the builders of the temple had no interest in highlighting this relationship in the first place. The temple and its sculptural decoration were meant to express Panhellenic values and standards rather than local traditions. Thus, the local elite of Korkyra presented themselves as part of a Panhellenic elite network. At the same time, the elite showed the local population that they were taking care of the religious landscape in an unstable and radically transformative situation.

Chapter 1 focuses on the social groups, the communicative constellations, and the media in which intentional history took shape. Texts in which the first-person plural, the collective ‘we’, was used, were particularly characteristic of this. In this way, they brought the historical events into a direct connection with the current audience. It is identical, as it were, with the past actors. These were his ancestors. The Greeks had countless poems and chants of this kind, which were found primarily in the epics of Homer and Hesiod. Especially among the elites who enjoyed such chants at their symposia, the idea prevailed that in this way their achievements would also be known in the future. As a result, the Greeks did not differentiate between mythical and (in our sense) historical events, and remembrance was also directed towards posterity. At the same time, the texts were firmly anchored in social and religious communication and thus part of life. This went so far that many citizens took part in performances of poetic works themselves (in choirs, for example), thus being themselves involved in the creation of intentional history.